Culture Teaches Us What To Fear

Culture teaches us what to fear. Culture tells us how to be neurotic or insane. In one culture we cover up and hide when mad. In another we rave in our nakedness. But there is a different kind of fear, an exaggerated state of fear we learn early from parents who are emotionally haunted by what they can’t understand or escape. Such parents are not there to protect and love their children, to spread ease in their lives. They alert us, their child, to exaggerated danger. They do not fill our hearts with a sense of love and protection. A child without a feeling of protection cannot exist intact. We feel abandoned from the start.

The fear we learn from them of real or imagined danger is a terrible state of mind to acquire and even harder to get rid of since the inner child, the “frozen child,” originally frozen by its parent’s icy fears, takes its fear as a connection to the parent. Anti-love is the love that the parent offers and is accepted as such.

What does an adult to do when it feels the fear of its “frozen child” which tells him to run away or surrender? The adult has to move towards what he is afraid of in order to investigate, not to let a negative first impression or learned expectation determine his final judgment. In the world of love, by running from what seems to threaten or by automatically surrendering to it, the adult is consigned to a lonely state or to a partner who will emotionally harm him. The self-designated victim has been captured by fear which rules him.